"Denzel just became Malcolm, and Spike Lee did an incredible job. And again, the story behind that of getting Oprah, whomever else to aid in it, finishing the movie. Even Spike, and what he did as an actor, even if it’s sort of playing his thing. It was just really, really good. He’s done, obviously, great ones. You know the other ones, Mo’ Better Blues and School Daze, and Do the Right Thing was just unbelievable. But there was so much polish and the brilliance in how he did this testimonial of an iconic guy that many people at the end started to really relate to, even more than Dr. King."

"To live in New York is to live in a place that is both heaven and hell, kept from dissolving into economic and racial chaos only by the maintenance of a minute-by-minute decency, respect, and understanding. Spike Lee spends a good amount of time, early in the film, dousing a Brooklyn neighborhood with gasoline, as we hold our breath to see who will strike a match. Making perhaps one of the twenty-five greatest dramas of the past thirty years, Lee is in Sidney Lumet territory here, by way of Paddy Chayefsky, by way of Huey P. Newton. The acting is, at times, as raw as you see in film. Danny Aiello, in the self-immolating role of the pizza shop owner who strips away decades of spiritual growth in a matter of minutes, gives one of the great performances in contemporary movie history, and both he and Lee, as screenwriter, were nominated for Oscars. Giancarlo Esposito, Ossie Davis, and John Turturro are riveting. Ernest R. Dickerson’s photography is memorable, as is Bill Lee’s music. But it’s Spike Lee, on his way to making films like Malcolm X and Clockers, who knocks you on your ass so hard you have trouble getting up at the closing credits."

"First one on my list is Do the Right Thing. Spike Lee, man. I actually saw that twenty times in the theaters. That’s before VCRs; I mean, that was like right when the VCRs were kind of happening, and you had to wait a year for something to come out on VHS. It wasn’t the quick turnaround like we have right now. But Do the Right Thing changed my life in so many ways, because I had never seen… it was a movie that was comedic, yet so powerful. I didn’t really have a definition, because I’d never seen black people on screen like that, and it was just one of those things. It was my era; it was my generation. There was a lot of blaxploitation before that, you know, and you could see people on TV, and all this stuff. But I remember I was in college, and it was kind of like this empowerment. Spike had made She’s Gotta Have It, but then Do the Right Thing really broke it down. It changed my life. It made me want to get into the business like never before. Totally. I was like, I am a Spike Lee nut; I want to do this. I thought it should have won Best Picture that year; it just meant so much. It just meant a lot to everybody. There was a lot of race relations stuff, and just think of the stars that came out of that: Sam Jackson, Martin Lawrence, and Spike himself, and Rosie Perez, and John Turturro. I mean, it’s just… Whew! It just changed the game, changed the game."

"So, actually, 25th Hour is my favorite Spike Lee movie for a whole bunch of reasons irrelevant for our purposes. But there’s no denying the power, the heat, and the energy—the perfection, really—of Do the Right Thing. And the cultural impact of it alone is worth the price of admission. It’s also one of my favorite New York movies. And one of my favorite modern fables. It’s stupid that I’m still typing. I don’t have to sell anyone on Do the Right Thing."

"Spike Lee’s finest movie. One of the movies that made me want to get into the movies as well. I knew I was never going to make Do the Right Thing, to do what he did with cinema and tell a story comedically but also dramatically. Very intense. That movie goes from a fun comedy — I don’t know if you can say fun comedy, but it’s a funny comedy — to a dramatic shift in tone. It’s a slow burn. You don’t notice it when it happens. It comes out of left field but it’s keeping in what has come before. You realize how masterfully it’s put together. That movie informed Clerks to a large degree: it takes place all in one day, in one particular block, in one very specific city. So that was the model I used for Clerks. So much so that the original version of Clerks Dante gets killed because I was like, “I want to do something like that.” Then I realized I’m not Spike Lee."

"I’ll start with 25th Hour, the Spike Lee movie. It was actually written by David Benioff, who writes Game of Thrones. It was my favorite movie before I met David, and when I found out that he had written it, I proceeded to — when drunk in a bar once — to give him my version of the Edward Norton monologue that happens during the movie. Really embarrassing. I cringe to this day that I did that and gave him my rendition of it. It’s just an amazing movie. I love Edward Norton, I love Philip Seymour Hoffman in it, Barry Pepper, you know. It’s a fantastic movie."